What A Beautiful Life This Mess Can Be

There have been places and events which have benefited me greatly through my attendance, even if they proved uncomfortable at the time of their occurence. Last summer, when I saw the Violent Femmes with Tyler after we had broken up, it was a crazy sort of catharsis. They ended with Kiss Off, or at least it was one of the songs towards the end of the set, and my entire body was wired with a nervous tension that could barely stand existence in a flesh-and-blood body. I was crackling with the frustration and irritation and confusion. It was good, though. Afterward, I was still manic and weird, so it's not that the show fixed anything, by any means, but it provided an outlet that cleansed something out of my system. Now the ice storm and Saul Williams have trumped that to an umpteenth degree. Friday night was Saul Williams at the Portland State Campus, and Erin and I attended, standing at the back of the crowded hall. Tyler detached himself from the faceless masses to join us, and later Matthew appeared at my elbow. The openers were both incredible. Intelligent female spoken word artists who blew me away with every other sentence. They were talking about beauty and love and insecurity and the places we've made for ourself in the world, with words I knew and some I didn't. They peppered their ideas with references to art, music, the Bible, and every time a piece ended I grew more and more excited for what would come next, while trying to remember all the good things they had just said so I could pull them out to think about at a later date. They went too fast, but I was glad to see them. Saul Williams always surprises me on first sight. I forget how dark he is as he emerges onto the stage, and how his slight frame silhouettes itself by its own relative character, even without a spotlight. He is his own shadow. I build him up taller and broader in my mind, in between the shows. He pulled off his sweatshirt, and for a second I thought he was going to literally and metaphorically strip for us up behind the mic. I don't know how to talk about how Saul Williams effects me, really. I always make a point to call it a religious event, and that seems to ring true. The only other thing I could really think of is when you play Boggle. There's the plastic box with the see-through cover, and all of the letters sprawl out on top of the grid, haphazardly turned this way and that. You've got to shake the box back and forth, and then all the letters fall into place and you can start finding the words you need. So many things have seemed ephemeral and confusing for me, lately. The place of art, the place of me, the place of my art. What are friends and how should they be treated? Why do I have the friends I do? Life as a whole was a very large and alarming place, and I was feeling uncertain, even though external events, by all accounts and purposes, felt like they'd be ok. Saul Williams was the hands, I was the Boggle game. When he talks, everything is illuminated, and I have a tactile awareness of the place of the things around me in this world, whether they're physical or not. These are the people I know, and this is what they mean to me and to others and to life as a greater whole. These are the possibilities open to me, these are the responsibilities I have as an individual to create and love. After it ended, all I really wanted to do was talk about the show. I wanted to hear more, I wanted to keep him looping through my head on a hourly basis so I could continually bask in the afterglow of that stunning clarity. Unfortunately, all things of that ilk must climax and then end, and it's up to the individual to take what they need from the experience and live in a way conscious of what has occured. So i went home and listened to my only Saul Williams mp3, Coded Language, about 5 times. The next day was the ice storm, and my first day off in about eighteen days. I was trapped, which i don't mind, for the most part. We decimated the alcohol supply by the end of the day, and wound up rummaging through the cupboards for the last bit of vodka and Kahlua from old bottles. It was cold enough to swear. In other words, every time you go outside, all you can think of to say is "Fuck! It's cold." Live Journal was down, as some of us know, but even that was good for me in its own way, forcing me to find other ways to occupy myself in my confined space. I read. I drew. I talked about writing, and then I wrote. We went to bed late, with a warm buzz in a house that was covered in ice. Today is like the chrysalis splitting, it's like the fresh breath you take after you leave a dark smoky club. It's when it snows, and as you're removing the thick white layers from your car, all of the dirt and grime comes with it, and your car looks cleaner than it has in ages. And I feel that mentally, too. Things are relevant and interesting, and I have a renewed dedication to..to what? I'm not sure how to sum up anything in particular, but I really like Saul Williams, and to have the people that were there with me in the same room while I was feeling all these things meant so much in how the scene plays back. Their proximity weighted the air with a knowledge of what exists between us, and for that matter, what doesn't. On the way to work again today, I had to take it slow over the Fremont Bridge, but it was worth it to look at the city poised beneath me in glistening stillness . I hope it never grows old, my joy in the perspective I get.